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I was actually looking for the “Commercial Breaks” video after reading about it on World of Spectrum a few weeks ago. I couldn’t find anything then, so it’s nice to see they are available. A fascinating slice of video games history 🙂

I found the game pirate investigation at the open market quite informative. The message that I obtained from viewing these is that a number of the early software games industry faced financial threat from pirate companies who copied successful games and then sold them to the general market for a cheaper price. The important message here is the need for a robust attitude towards those that abuse the rights of others.

YouTube recently came to an agreement with musicians and song writers pertaining to people who use their music in their online videos. The rights of game developers and game producers should be the same, especially with online browser games. That are very vulnerable to being stolen.

However, there appears to be a similarity with how some browser games, like Travian of Travian Games http://www.traviangames.com/content/what-we-do, a game that originated with Tribal Wars of Inno Games http://www.innogames.de/en/, become a clone that dominates the workings of many online browser games today. In this respect society appears to have learnt very little from the experiences of these early computer game companies. The pirates still exist, it is just that their repackaging has become more capable of disguising this from less informed viewers.